


The Singleton Flat

by greywash



Series: "build your wings" and associated paraphernalia [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alcoholism, Depression, Gen, Grief, Loneliness, Post-Reichenbach, Queer Themes, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 09:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11310609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: Clara's shelves wore Harry's leaving lightly: John had to look, to notice the gaps.[Autumn 2013.]





	The Singleton Flat

**Author's Note:**

> **gins** : when I did the timeline I was like  
>  **gins** : "oh well that's a story I'm not ever going to write"  
>  **hbbo** : LOL
> 
> (Best laid plans, &c.)
> 
> This is in the same universe as "[build your wings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4100593/)" (which: no, byw is not abandoned, I've just had a rough couple months working out some problems with part 52 while being, variously, in finals, in lab chaos, and then deathly ill). While you can read this totally separately from byw and it should make sense, it does refer to bits of the byw backstory timeline that will probably alter your understanding of this story; similarly, reading this may alter your understanding of certain things in "build your wings." It shouldn't really matter what order you read them in, if you do decide to read them both.
> 
>  **Warnings for disturbing content**. My full warning policy is in my [profile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile#warnings) and I also am totally willing to reply to [emails](mailto:greywash@gmail.com) or **[non-anonymous](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/ask)** Tumblr asks if you have any specific warning-related questions that you would like me to answer.

Time passed, after, because that was inevitably what it did. Near the end of October Harry rang him and said very little, her breath thick and irregular at the end of the line, and that Saturday John went over to help her lug a smallish constellation of boxes down the stairs to the boot of a hired car parked badly at the kerb, because the lift wasn't working. She didn't say it was over, but it _felt_ over, to John, in a way it hadn't any of the other times; collecting Harry's green carry-on, at the last, from where it huddled lonely beside her laptop bag and a solitary Ikea desk lamp just inside the foyer, John raised his head, almost for the first time, realizing that the flat smelled, very faintly, of the citrusy European unisex cologne that Clara favored; and almost nothing else. Clara wasn't home. Her shelves wore Harry's leaving lightly: John had to look, to notice the gaps. 

Harry put the lamp and her laptop case in the boot, and they were finished. It was half past nine in the morning. She'd found a depressing bedsit 'round the corner from John's depressing bedsit: just temporary, she'd explained, while she hunted down a real flat. She'd sounded tired. John drove. It made him uncomfortable: he'd never liked driving in cities. They got the car emptied and returned before eleven, her boxes stacked tidily against the wall beside the head of her new single bed. 

It was, John supposed, the upside of a half a decade splitting up in slow motion: seven separations in, Harry'd long since culled her belongings with the ruthlessness only really achievable by someone unwilling to give up something entirely different: the CD collection that she'd built, painstakingly, over her first twenty years of disposable income had been digitized and discarded back in 2011; she didn't buy books anymore, just got them from the library. He didn't know if she still even kept any painting supplies, these days. Over time her wardrobe had been pared to something almost like a uniform: solid button-down shirts in various shades of grey, with short sleeves and long sleeves, three each; two pairs of shoes, loafers and brogues; a black belt; a grey scarf; a black wool coat; a black turtleneck; a blue cardigan; eight pairs of black socks; a presumably equally pragmatic collection of underwear; two pairs of earrings; a single pair of jeans; and three extremely well-tailored three-piece trouser suits, which, she had once carefully explained, she had specifically selected in all the same shades of blue and grey that would to allow her to wear the pieces in odd combinations: herringbone with pinstripe with tweed. It was also, John knew but did not say, a strategy that allowed her to get dressed blind drunk and still look professional and put-together; Harry had never once stopped seeing patients: a detail which John had observed, once, to Ella, contributed to his mistrust of the profession. Harry was always well-dressed. She had, however, stopped wearing lipstick at some point several years ago, because it simply wasn't possible to make lipstick similarly resilient to disaster. 

The car returned, they bought a pair of flaccid sandwiches from a sullen teenager at a cafe by the car hire and then took them, inexplicably, back to Harry's new flat to eat them. It was a miserable little box of a room: John sat on the end of her bed, because she didn't have any chairs. Harry sat on the floor. She'd been doing yoga, lately, she explained; she liked the stretch. "We could've eaten outside," John observed: they weren't far from a park. It wasn't too cold yet. Harry nodded, but neither of them made any effort to move; it seemed, John thought, oddly fitting, that the Watson children should end up both abandoned and unmarried: their parents had been difficult, too. In the car on the way over Harry had been groaning, half-joking, about tragic singletons; nothing that might actually hurt. She knew everything that John had done, of course, so she didn't mention any of it; it was, John was finding, a profound relief.

It did get cold after that, and much faster than it had before that. In his shabby poorly insulated bedsit John thought he ought to feel it more, but he didn't, not exactly. It felt—clarifying, somehow. A few times he caught himself half-remembering the autumn of the previous year, when he'd still been living in Baker Street: it made him feel almost dizzy, still; like a wound still bleeding; an uncloseable gash. He remembered, very clearly, that last autumn he'd been cold all the time. He knew, however, that in Baker Street he'd always had to sleep with his window open, November to March: if Mrs. Hudson wanted to not freeze to death it meant the upper storeys were perpetually overheated. These two things could not both be true. It was strange, discomfiting: John'd never really thought of himself as a liar before. But here, now, in November of 2013, John wasn't cold, not particularly. He wondered, a bit, if he had ever really been cold in the Novembers that came before—but not very hard. He had things to do. He went to work. He went home. He found himself on the phone with Harry more nights than not: peculiar. They'd never before been, precisely, close. Harry was trying to dry out, sort of. She seemed, John thought, resigned to it in a way she hadn't been before: she seemed tired of it, bored with drink, bored with herself. She went to yoga twice a week. She had started going too to some sort of support group, John knew, but she didn't like to talk about it: now _that_ , John thought, was a change. One Friday night they went out for a curry together instead of just half-talking about nothing on speakerphone and John asked, surprising himself; she was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "It's for people in the community, with problems with. Drugs, or drink, or"; and then she stopped and said, quite unnecessarily, "The LGBTQ community, I mean."

John nodded. His face felt warm, but not, he suspected, warm enough to show. "Does it help?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said; and then she said, "It helps to be—not alone"; and their eyes met across the table, and clicked.

A peculiar sensation, that. A key in a lock: a palpable, _physical_ sense of connection; still new to John, almost. John felt, in that instant, as though he had never seen her before; as though she was a different person: this woman, his elder sister, whom he had of course known for the whole of his life. All around them there were other diners, seated in clusters of various sizes, devouring mediocre curry at half-eight on a Friday; but John felt, for an instant, as though they were citizens of another country. As though Harry was speaking to him in a language which, among all of them, only John knew. How many? he found himself wondering, impossibly. How many were they, in this room? He was suddenly certain that it was only them, and no one else: but that couldn't possibly be true, could it? John's skin was prickling. There were, perhaps, forty people in the restaurant: by the law of averages, John thought, somewhere between four and ten of them were likely to not be heterosexual. His gaze traveled about the room; but no one met it but a young man in a suit eating alone and reading something desultorily on his mobile; who looked up at John for a half an instant and then looked, embarrassed, away. Pairs and groups of pairs: men and women, women with men, mothers and fathers with children; the only single-gender group was a trio of women at the table to John's left, presently discussing the inadequacies of their boyfriends. By the window, a group of five young professionals, three women two men, all of them obviously just come from work, were flirting openly, in various and varying configurations; and John found himself, absurdly, growing angry. They all of them looked just like everyone else, John knew; and that felt, suddenly, like a betrayal. How could he find them? How did they find each other? Did they just—drift, as he drifted, until they by accident ceased to be alone? Despite her long hair he and Harry had always looked so like each other they'd never be taken for anything but brother and sister; were often—rather irrationally—taken for twins; but could it—could it _possibly_ be that every other man and woman in this restaurant, in all their many and varied pairs, were _not_? Was it possible that he and Harry, only, sat carved away from them; alone; apart?

John thought: _but I could go back to—_ ; but he knew, very certainly, that he could not.

A new door opened. That other door, closed. Harry spent one Wednesday night on speakerphone telling him not to come over, weeping into her toilet, down a half a bottle of whiskey and the better part of two bottles of wine. Listening to her lying the wrong way around on his too-hard single mattress John felt so alone it made it hard to breathe: he didn't want her to die. He wanted, suddenly, with a ferocity that he found frightening, for her to get sober; to paint again; to meet a lovely too-serious woman who wasn't Clara; to adopt a dog. It felt, suddenly, enormous; perilous: that he and Harry both lived without partners, had as far as he could tell no friends but each other, that they were here in 2013 the both of them so alone. It felt like giving in. He felt the sea of London around them, brutal and uncaring—but it wasn't, was it? _Was_ it? He didn't—he barely knew. What did one do, when one found oneself, at forty-one, gayer than one'd expected, living alone in a garden-level bedsit, with an alcoholic sister who was, functionally speaking, one's only friend? The entirety of one's circle, razed to their tiny twinned orbit; an entire city's worth of people that John didn't know, or couldn't know, or had been instructed with extreme prejudice not to know; and then, in the middle of all of it: them. 

Harry didn't die that night. She went back to her group meeting instead. A few days later, John went with her; she'd looked at him, startled, when he'd asked, but she hadn't said no; so he went. She hadn't talked at all that night, but sat beside him at the back while he sat with his head bowed in silence and listened, and wiped at his face with his fingers, more often than he'd liked. He didn't go back, but when Harry mentioned, later in the month, that she was thinking of going for individual sessions with one of the therapists who ran it, it prickled all along John's back. "Harry," he said, very quietly; and then, very quietly, he asked.

So. That was George. 

George wasn't much like Ella, and he wasn't like Harry at all; he was a tall, slim blond in his late thirties who wore colored jeans and chiffon scarves and hipster glasses and spoke with a slight but unmistakable lisp. At first John'd wondered if Harry was having a laugh at his expense, but John found instead, very quickly, that he _liked_ George, rather a lot. George had a lot more energy than John'd ever really thought to associate with a therapist; and a sly, cutting sense of humor that could knock John out of himself better than anything Ella'd ever tried. George didn't seem particularly judgmental about any bad idea John'd had last summer in club basements or Shoreditch living rooms or the backs of cabs, but he did encourage John to get tested: everything came back negative, a not-entirely-deserved bit of luck. John found that months of regular work with no personal life to speak of had rather swelled his savings account, so he went to see him more often than he perhaps would've expected he would've wanted to, in the past. It helped. It seemed to help Harry, too. With each other they didn't much discuss the specifics. A lot of the time, John found, he couldn't. He wept through three sessions in a row in the middle of December and came out feeling hollowed out; lighter; as though he might sound like a bell. Harry, for her part, was seeing the woman therapist who'd led the group the night that John had come, a knee-high butch Asian woman who was apparently really into crystals. John didn't know what they did with them, but it seemed, obscurely, to be of use.

When on the Monday morning just before Christmas, Harry rang and said, "Listen," John did. He worked another shift where Rhoda tried, with not much grace and even less subtlety, to wheedle out of him disclosures of a personal nature; and then dashed over to look at the place without missing his book club, because George was constantly bothering him about getting out more. He didn't want to be late, even if the book club _was_ awkwardly well supplied with lesbians; but Harry was right: it was a nice flat. It was on the second storey, no lift; with well-worn wood floors and big south-eastern exposure windows; and the two bedrooms were small, but more or less equally proportioned, and they didn't share a wall. It'd do: after all, they'd already spent their childhood fighting over a single bath. 

"Well?" Harry asked, leaning against the door with her coat over her arms, one tweedy knee bent up, the sole of her brogue pressed to the wall. The estate agent was half-glaring at her on behalf of the trim, his mouth pinched. John nodded; and Harry smiled at him, eyes crinkling up.

They moved in just after the new year, first thing in the morning; they'd both arranged a half-day off work. Harry'd bought them a cafetière as a combined Christmas-housewarming present, and John at least knew how to brew it so you didn't end up drinking tar, so they unpacked it and John made the coffee while Harry scrambled eggs for the two of them, which they ate awkwardly out of a cereal bowl and a travel mug, because neither of them had any plates.

"Ikea, after work," Harry said decisively. She'd borrowed the car from Nigel, one of the men in her group, who'd had them both over for Boxing Day and was out of town until Monday, visiting his mother in Spain. "I can pick you up."

"All right," John said, scraping at the last of his eggs.

Harry was staring out their huge windows, looking thoughtful.

"Yeah?" he asked, coming over. Buildings, streetlights, the faint sounds of morning traffic in the street below. 

"Not bad," she said, "for a tragic singleton flat."

He snorted. "It's the nicest place either of us has ever lived, don't pretend you don't know it," he said. She didn't answer, but she leaned into him, pressing their shoulders together.

"The light'll be perfect," she said, very quietly; and _oh_ : "Yeah," he said, thick.

She nodded. Warm through her cardigan. Beside her John sipped his coffee. They watched the sun come up between buildings, huddled and emberish, an eggy luminescence low in the cold sharp sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Rebloggable on [Tumblr](https://fizzygins.tumblr.com/post/162285016992/welp), if you like.


End file.
